BioWare's Emmanuel Lusinchi, lead designer on Star Wars: The Old Republic, tells gamesTM that the quality of some competing MMOGs is more of a factor than how they are free-to-play as something that has caused them to rethink their approach to their MMORPG. Along the way, he does admit that they are "looking at" F2P: "The MMO market is very dynamic and we need to be dynamic as well," he says. "Unless people are happy with what they have, they are constantly demanding updates, new modes and situations. So we are looking at free-to-play but I canít tell you in much detail. We have to be flexible and adapt to what is going on."

Slashman wrote on Jun 15, 2012, 00:45:Retard-friendly! I'm thinking I should save that quote somewhere for future reference 'cause that's exactly how I think of WoW.

WoW isn't retard friendly, it's normal person friendly, which is why it's such a massive success. I've encountered everyone from grannies and housewives to businessmen with heavy workloads to the cliched students and unemployed with lots of time to waste. I've not encountered such a range roaming lowsec in Eve, and CCP doesn't pretend to cater to them.

WoW provides a wide range of things to do at many difficulties and time requirements, TOR doesn't. You either PvP, run flashpoints/operations or roll another alt and play through 95% of the exact same content.

When the more "hardcore" reached 50 and rapidly ran out of things to do at the new year they were mocked for burning content and complaining, but now the more casual players are reaching the same conclusion and even finding it worse, because many casual MMO players don't regularly PvP or Raid.

If they want to save this I'd suspect they'd need to ditch the godawful raid or die model and refocus on what they did best, the story centred leveling. However, with the production costs they've burdened themselves with, is it even possible to release such content regularly enough even if they sold it in a cash shop through F2P?

I'd personally prefer it if they stripped the MMO shit out, repackaged it as a singleplayer game with co-op and sold mini expansions.